The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [55]
This, Ben found nearly as stupefying as the pilot part. The runway they had just come in on was pulverized ice, gray banks of chips spewed up by metal grippers in countless plane tires, with furrows that were more like ruts to land into. Buzzing around out there in thirty below, on one of the little tow tractors called bugs, sounded to him like a job for only the hardiest Eskimo. Or a madwoman. Or worse.
"Jake, or should I just say Bonehead—"
"Ben, Ben, hold it down, okay?"
"—get your mind up from between your legs and think about this a little, will you? What the hell are you doing, bucking for a Section Eight? Anybody the Russians trust enough to station here is apt to be a Red, like those big stars on the sides of these planes, remember? And the United States government does not look kindly on the Communist Party."
"What are they going to get me for, consorting with an ally?" Ben's point did cause Jake to reflect. "I wouldn't be surprised if she diddled a commissar or two along the way to get here. She knows her diddling."
"Will you listen a goddamn minute? You and Tractor Woman—"
"Katya. Katya Gyorgovna Zhukova. The Russians really go in for names."
"Jake, we're heading to the mess hall," the copilot called. "You two coming?"
"My scribe and me have got matters of national importance to attend to. You're in charge, Charlie, see you at breakfast."
The copilot gave a wave and was on his way. "What happens when you get famous."
Ben was furiously fumbling out of the last of his layers of flying gear. "Do you have a lick of sense left at all? Maybe you're living on love, but I need chow."
"You're going to get it, don't worry," Jake soothed. "The Russkies have their own mess hall and they like to talk shop with B-17 pilots. C'mon, you're gonna meet Katya."
He wondered if he was imagining, but the crowded mess hall smelled to him straight off the pages of Dostoyevsky. Cabbage, dank wool clothing, copious boot grease. Feeling as if he was in another world, he spooned up the formidable soup and devoured hunks of bread while Jake alternately ate and banked his hands through the air in testimony to the maneuvering capabilities of B-17s. Across the table, Russian pilots who looked like either plowboys or middle-aged pirates—the generation between had largely been wiped out by the Germans' demonic sieges from Leningrad to Sevastopol—listened monastically. Amid the bulky men, a woman who was not at all what Ben had expected—trim, keen, authoritative; she reminded him alarmingly of Cass—translated Jake's effusions and Russian spatters of questions.
"Yakov, they say, how big bomb pile?"
"Bomb load, right, three tons," Jake made an expansive gesture, "do you have those back home?"
"Tonna," Katya reported and translated the tonnage, drawing the first smiles from the Russian airmen.
At first Ben had been relieved to see other American uniforms in the roomful of brown drab, a plump major and a couple of shavetail aides sitting with an ascetic-looking Russian majordomo of some sort. The major proved to be the liaison officer, which meant he was there only under obligation, and in a matter of minutes had sent over the more diminutive of the aides to inquire why they were not in their own mess hall with everyone else. Awful good question, shorty. Jake pulled out all the stops, citing Ben as a big-shot correspondent chronicling Lend-Lease and the peerless pilots of both nations. When the underling relayed that, the major gave them an edgy look, but he directly departed and so did the thin-featured political commissar or whatever he was. The entire room sat at attention until the man was out the door. The moment he was gone, Katya relaxed and turned to Ben. "You are from gazeta?" Her voice was throaty and adventurous, and in spite of himself he could imagine how smoky it would sound in bedroom circumstances.
"Gazettes of all kinds, right, Ben?" Jake trumpeted. "He's as important in our country as your guys on Pravda."
"Thanks all to hell for the comparison," Ben snapped. The Russian airmen